Pick Your Poison
by toonsta
Summary: Sometimes he felt like he was just the default choice: the one who didn't kill her sister. A series of Katniss/Peeta drabbles post-war.
1. Poison

**Summary:** Sometimes he felt like he was just the default choice, the one who didn't kill her sister.

**Disclaimer:**The characters and world do not belong to me.

**Pick Your Poison**

He once told her that sometimes it felt like he was just her default choice, because Gale's trap had killed Prim. She had wanted to punch him, scream at him, demand from him how he dared use Prim to justify his insecurities. Instead she had gone to the woods. It had been soon after the war. Being in a semi-normal relationship had been new to them.

She sat by the katniss pond, memories lapped at her mind like waves on a shore, she burrowed her toes further into the soft brown mud and tried not to drown in them.

Her name was Katniss Everdeen. She lived in district twelve. She had food in her belly. She had a warm house to go back to. She had nothing to fear. She did this; she catalogued. It was something safe for her mind to do. There was too much time for thought in this new life of hers. Before she was always a stride ahead of her demons. Now that the running and the fighting are over she cannot outstrip them anymore; her new life does not demand constant action, constant presence in the now. She thought she would like that, but most days she hates it.

Peeta is different from Gale. He doesn't automatically understand her motivations. They don't think in such similar patterns that they barely have to speak like she and Gale had. Gale knew that the moment his trap killed Prim any chance he had had was gone. But she thinks he must have known before then too. Sometimes he was better at knowing her mind than she was. Somewhere, subconsciously, probably since sometime during her second stay in an arena, she had known she and Gale would never work again.

At Capitol events she had often been asked to 'pick her poison' by a multi-coloured waitron bearing alcohol. But they had picked the real poison for her; nightlock, tracker-jacker venom, doubts and fears and memories of dead kids. She'd had her mind messed with one too many times. She'd been manipulated and targeted and hero worshipped. She was damaged. Peeta had been fed the same poison. He was damaged too.

Gale was different. He was hardened from living in the seam, hardened from fighting in a war, but not damaged. She had been that way once too. She had been a sixteen year old with a family to feed, dirt beneath her finger nails and a bone to pick with the world. Then she had lived a life that made that girl look innocent.

Maybe if she had remained that girl she would have ended up with Gale. But she didn't. Instead she saw Glimmer turn into a shapeless mound of flesh, covered Rue in flowers, fed Cato to the wolves, looked into Peeta's eyes and knew she could eat the nightlock… instead she had sparked a rebellion she'd never meant to spark. The girl who was on fire? She had played with fire and she had been burned.

Maybe Peeta didn't know what she was thinking all the time, but even if their minds weren't the same, their scars were. Gale's nature was too much like hers, his experience too foreign. She and Peeta were similar and different in all the right ways.

He couldn't see it. Gale had. Prim was a barrier they would never be able to cross, but they had had those way before she died.

She shoved her dirty feet into her hunting boots and stood. If Peeta needed to hear it all out loud it was okay. She could tell him what she was thinking, just like he could let her go into the woods alone.

**AN:** This is something that has been sitting on my computer for ages along with a couple of other Katniss/Peeta drabbles. If you enjoy this let me know and I'll add the others on to this fic. Reviews would be greatly appreciated!


	2. Hesitation

**AN: **Does not follow directly after the first piece, but some time later.

**Hesitation**

She is terrified of having children. At first she believes it's the tenuous peace that frightens her; the idea that perhaps this fragile new order they have created might collapse and destroy what remains of her family. She does not want to bring more children into a world that offers nothing but suffering.

But the years of peace stretch and the new order becomes more robust, so that her reasoning slowly becomes as tenuous as the peace once was. It is only when this excuse no longer excuses her hesitation that she is forced to face up to the real reasons for her terror.

She has been trying to take care of people for almost her whole life. From the moment her father had died all the responsibility had come to rest directly on her shoulders. She remembers that first year of her adulthood in her gut; the ache of hunger has left a scar there that will never go away, no matter how she gorges herself. She remembers Prim's hollow blue eyes and the desperation and powerlessness she had felt as she watched her wisp of a sister fading away.

She fears that feeling; that helplessness.

And the games had only intensified her fear. Over and over again she had become responsible for others; for Prim, for Rue, for Peeta. And over and over she had not been able to keep them safe. Rue had been murdered on her watch. Peeta had been brainwashed while she hid in District Thirteen. And Prim, Prim with her wide blue eyes and gentle hands and duck tail had been obliterated as she watched.

She could save herself but never the others. In her nightmares she was bound and forced to watch on as her loved ones were systematically annihilated.

She couldn't do it again.

And even if she could, what kind of mother would she be? She had been hard when she entered the arena the very first time; a survivor from the seam with a chip on her shoulder and a bone to pick with the world. She was something else when she left and something worse by the time it was all over. She had spent too long being the pawn of countless powers to see the world as anything but hostile. She had been subjected to too many cruelties at the hands of other people to believe in the inherent goodness of the human race anymore. By the end she found in herself not hope for a new beginning; but resignation. She was resigned to whatever fate might next befall her and to the bitter taste that victory had left in her mouth.

She told Peeta that a woman as hard as she was should not be a mother.

He told her that a woman as hard as she claimed to be wouldn't play real and not real with him, or hold him and comb her fingers through his hair after his every nightmare. Then he took her to see Annie and little Finn for a week.

When she found the words to give him, he found the actions to give back.

**AN:**Thank you to the two people who sent feedback, it was much appreciated. I have a later drabble I can add on if you'd like.


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